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Polish scientist summarises 15 year cyberbullying research

During the 15th “Keeping Children and Young People Safe Online” International Conference, Dr Jacek Pyżalski summarised 15 years of his research into online aggression and violence.

According to the scientist “in today’s world, every serious violence that happens in real life quickly moves to the Internet and begins to have a dimension of cyberbullying – completely differently than 15 years ago”.

“At the beginning, cyberbullying was considered the kind of violence that always ‘hurts more’ and is particularly severe compared to traditional violence. But later studies have shown that some cases of cyberbullying have weaker consequences,” he added.

However, it is difficult to separate the two, because most victims experience both traditional harassment as well as cyberbullying. Furthermore, Cyberbullying is a much broader phenomenon that goes far beyond peer violence. There is a problem of harassment against groups like people with disabilities or other nationalities.

Dr Pyżalski added that Research shows that many young people do not accept cyberbullying, they clearly say ‘no’ to peer harassments, but, felt more laxed on cyberbullying that targets celebrities, which has a completely different nature.

Among some of the effective forms of intervention to stop the phenomenon of cyberbullying, the scientist named the actions and reactions of witnesses as effective. In his opinion, activating witnesses is a good direction in stopping cyberbullying. It is also necessary to fight “the conviction that a witness can not report even in a serious situation to anyone because he or she will be a snitch,” he emphasised.

“These are promising directions of research, but they raise ethical concerns because, for example, someone will be able to view all our correspondence via a machine,” the expert concluded.

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